Friday, 14 November 2014

Cathedral to Mammon in a city of bling

Before we set off last week for a few days in
Barcelona, my friend’s young son had a simple request. “Can you get me Messi’s
autograph?” he asked.

Simple to ask, not so simple to fulfil.

The world’s finest footballer doesn’t tend to mix
with the tourists in the Rambla.

Except in the sense that his name and number appear
on the shirt-backs of countless hordes, both of the sightseeing visitors and
the home fans.

Small boys, fat middle-aged blokes, teenage twin
Japanese girls - they all bear the name of Lionel Messi on their
purple-and-blue striped tops. Which must make it a very strange experience for
the man himself if indeed he ever does take a stroll through the city centre.

He’s there, too, on a myriad posters on street
corners and in the Metro advertising the next home game at the Nou Camp. In
English.

Presumably the mighty Barca feel no need to
advertise their fixtures to their own fans, but are happy to boost their
coffers with a bit of tourist cash.

Football is a religion in Spain - and nowhere more
so than in Barcelona, where the Nou Camp is its grandiose temple.

But there’s another, bigger, religion. A worldwide
worship. The prevailing ritual and belief system of the 21st century. The
driving force and obsession, it seems, of nearly every society on the planet.

I refer, of course, to the worship of Mammon.

It’s related, inevitably, to football. Money now
talks a lot louder than trophies and medals.

But then the religion of Mammon gets into
practically everything these says. Such as, for instance... religion.

As we exited the Sagrada Familia Metro station
right outside the world-famous cathedral of that name (otherwise known as the “Gaudi
cathedral”, after its architect), I marvelled at the length of the coralled
queue. Waiting, not to get in - they’d have to queue again for that - but to
buy tickets for later admission. And if you want to go up one of the towers,
that’ll be a case of buy now, come back tomorrow.

Simple entrance to the still-unfinished cathedral will
set you back about £15 each. Add another fiver for the tower. Or potentially
rather more – up to about £25 total – if you get suckered into one of the “deals”
or “offers” from various websites. We managed to pay online at the official
price before we’d reached the front of the ticket-office queue.

As we edged forward beneath Gaudi’s
statue-encrusted, dripping-stone facade, I experienced a deep fellow-feeling
with Christ.

Not, it may be said, for anything like the first
time. And not because I espouse Christianity, or any other religious faith.

I’ve always thought the real Jesus - so far as we
can be sure there ever was such a person, or exactly what he stood for - has
been badly served by Christianity.

In all the stories, the one where his humanity
comes through most clearly is when he overturns the money-changers’ tables.

As told in John 2, after throwing the tradesmen out
of the temple, he tells them: "Take these things hence! Make not My Father’s
house a house of merchandise!”

What he would make of the Sagrada Familia, or the
City of London - or pretty much any city in the world today - is an interesting
question.

But let’s be fair here. Once we got inside the
cathedral - more than 24 hours after paying for the privilege - I found it a
revelation.

I’d been here before, 12 years ago, when my experience
of the interior was severely limited by scaffolding, men in hard hats, and
tarpaulins blocking almost everything from view. It left me totally unprepared
for the glorious space now revealed, the other-worldly elegance of the slender
pillars and the roof they support, and the light thrown by the loveliest of
modern stained glass in the windows.

Even the queue protocols make sense when you see
them as a way of ensuring the cathedral never gets too crowded to appreciate.

The way the architecture combines engineering with
artistic invention is uplifting, but not exactly a religious experience.
Certainly not for me - not for the hundreds to be seen (like me) at any given moment wielding cameras left and right - and not really, I suspect, for people a lot more
religious than I am.

If there’s a touch of bling about it, that’s hardly
out of keeping with what the Catholic Church has always been.

And in Barcelona right now it doesn’t have quite
that old nasty taste of extravagance amidst poverty.

From its shiny shopfronts to its clean, efficient
transport system the city hardly seems mired in the financial despair we hear
Spain as a whole is suffering.

Which leads to an uncomfortable thought about
Catalonia’s eager desire for independence, as expressed in Sunday’s
“unofficial” referendum.

That this might be a case not of an oppressed
minority seeking its freedom, but of a rich region wishing to leave its poor
neighbours by the wayside. Which is very bling, if not very Christian.